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AOTW: How did you choose to be a fantasy writer? Or did the genre choose you?
Michael Stackpole: Fantasy has long been a genre of interest for me, starting with the novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs and the stories of Robert E. Howard. The Lord of the Rings, which I read the first time in high school, really drew me into the whole epic saga area, but I never thought I'd be able to write anything with that scope. Luckily enough, after working hard, and devouring the work of writers like Stephen R. Donaldson and Dennis L. McKiernan, I got to a point where I could make a run at such things.
L.E. Modesitt: I actually started up thinking I was going to be a poet. I didn't write my first story until I was 28, and it was a science fiction story, not a fantasy. I wrote science fiction solely for almost the first fifteen years of my professional career, and then wrote The Magic of Recluce --- my first fantasy novel --- as a personal challenge.
Margaret Weis: The genre chose me. I went to work as a book editor for TSR, Inc. in 1983. I was placed in charge of the novel side of the new Dragonlance project. My job was to work with Tracy Hickman, who had come up with the idea of a world of warring dragons and the people caught up in the battle. TSR planned to do novels along with the games and, after many months of work on the project, Tracy and I knew that we were the only people who could write these books.
Robin Hobb: One of the cardinal rules that writers are always handed is 'Write what you know.' I think the corollary of that should be 'Write what you read.' If you don't sincerely love a genre, be it westerns or mysteries or fantasy, you are not going to write it from the heart. And readers will know if your heart is not in what you write. I read across a wide spectrum, but fantasy is where my heart lies. So fantasy is what I write.
Elizabeth Haydon: It chose me, though I am very glad it did not stand on ceremony waiting for an invitation. I've spent the majority of my career in publishing on the educational side, editing and developing curriculum. A friend, a trade editor, was collecting for a fiction line and asked me to take a stab at writing a trilogy that would be primarily epic fantasy but that would cross genres with mystery, adding elements of romance, with our common interests in anthropology, linguistics, medieval music and herbalism. One alcohol-fueled New Orleans supper, the death of the collecting editor, a movie option and a bidding war later, the Rhapsody saga was realized.
I try not to relate this story to aspiring writers, because it is all wrong-this is not the way it is supposed to happen, nor is it the way it usually does. So while I more than willing to admit that my career is a fluke, it is nonetheless a fluke for which I am exceedingly grateful.
Lynn Flewelling: The genre chose me. I was an English major in college, read all sorts of books, including fantasy, horror, SF, and loads of literature. My early short fiction tended more toward horror, but then the character Seregil came along and just sort of took over. He required a fantasy landscape, so I built one for him. Sixteen years and four books later, I'm still expanding the boundaries and history there.
Terri Windling: I have always loved fairy tales, myths, and epic romance of the Arthurian sort. As result, I studied folklore and literature in college, and then headed straight to New York City upon graduation with the determination to get a job in the publishing industry. I chose to work in the fantasy field because that's where contemporary mythic and fairy tale fiction is flourishing these days. I've now been working in this field for over twenty years, and it remains a creatively fecund and exciting place to be.
Juliet McKenna: When the time came to stop thinking vaguely how nice it would be to be a writer and actually do something about it, the choice for me was between fantasy and crime. I've read both genres for as long as I can remember and both appealed as ways of telling a good story with a beginning, a middle and an end, with some thrills along the way. At that time, I was at home with two small children, which rather precluded the detailed research essential for a convincing crime novel. That was the key factor tipping the fine balance towards fantasy since I reckoned if I made it up out of my own head and kept the internal logic consistent, no one could tell me I'd got it wrong.
Martha Wells: I grew up reading Andre Norton and Robert Heinlein and other SF and Fantasy authors. I think I lean toward fantasy in my own writing because I've always been very interested in history and I like recreating or taking elements from real historical time periods for the worlds I make up.
Lois McMaster Bujold: I was a reader first; I started reading adult science fiction and fantasy when I was about nine years old, and read in the genres intensively during my teens (the 1960's). When I came to write, I naturally wanted to recreate the sort of reading experiences that gave me the most pleasure. Fantasy, SF, adventure, mystery, history and romance were my favorites; happily, I can include the last four in the first two, so it's not as if I have to forgo anything.
Sean Russell: In my case the genre chose me. I wrote my first book, The Initiate Brother, as an exercise to learn certain narrative skills. I never expected to publish it or, once published, for it to do so well. Suddenly I was a fantasy author, which was fine by me.
Teresa Edgerton: Most definitely, the genre chose me. I had very little choice in the matter. From an early age, all of my story ideas featured some sort of fantastic element. It was my good fortune that the fantasy genre became so popular just about the time that I became serious about my own writing.
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